"Reality hacking—designer lifestyles and pranks that playfully interrupt the scheduled programming of the masses—is a way of life for Happy Mutants."
R. U. Sirius continues from this definition to muse on the history of the term, from his re-branding of his own magazine High Frontiers to Reality Hackers, which was re-branded as Mondo 2000 (you can find digitized copies of all three magazines via Anarchivism). He looks farther back, to cave paintings, which used the "power of symbols [to shape] the viewer's perception of reality. The big shots of the cave clans used symbols not only to change the way their minions perceived the world around them, but also to convince them that imaginary things, like gods and demons, existed." Transmission of signals followed, from smoke signals to television.
R. U. Sirius notes that signal transmission used to require lots of money. "But in the last decade or so, media technology has become so cheap that almost anyone can buy a modem, publish a zine, or set up a pirate radio station and get in on the reality hacking business."
Oh, the 1990s were an idyllic, hopeful time, weren't they? Before national and political disinformation campaigns became the norm, when the power of distributed and decentralized communication was re-claimed by people in power, for a fraction of the price of prior signal transmissions.
But enough of this bleakness, let's look back (and look around) for low-cost, DIY reality hacking adventures!
[Source of the graphic above: Anti-Film School's blog post on drive-in intermission bumpers]
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